SEO Education Channel Digest: February 2018

My (brilliant, diligent and scrappy) team at Two Octobers has an “SEO Education” Slack channel, where we share links to articles we find interesting or educational. I use Paperbot to compile these links into my inbox, because I can, and I figured it makes sense to share. I mean…if my team thinks it’s useful, and they’re a bunch of geniuses, it probably makes sense that other people would be interested too. I’ve compiled them below, loosely categorized and in no particular order.

Agencies, in-house SEOs, and small business owners all know how important Google local results are and so we all pay close attention to our Knowledge Panels for photos, reviews and changes. But that job just got harder with Google’s newest feature; Google Questions and Answers (Q&A).

Google has recently updated their phone number rules to say a business needs to use a “local phone number.” They no longer mention call tracking numbers at all. And maintaining consistent information across search engines is no longer like jumping through hoops.

Link-building at the local level has become a great strategy for those looking to position themselves in territorial niches. Although it’s true that a micro market is less tempting than a full market, building local links can become one of the best forms of growth when a local business is getting started.

(Local Pack) ads seem to appear primarily on mobile results, with some limited testing on desktop results. We’ve heard rumors about local pack ads as far back as 2016, but very few details. How prevalent are these ads, and how seriously should you be taking them?

Google has added a way to search inside a mall for the local stores and businesses at a shopping center. Just go to your mobile phone, search for your local mall or shopping center, and a “directory” tab should show up at the top.

Fake reviews are a growing problem for those of us that own small businesses. In the online world, it’s extremely easy to create a new account and leave either a positive or negative review for any business — regardless of whether you’ve ever tried to hire them.

One of the recent enhancements added to Google My Business listings is called a “Post.” The great thing about Google Posts is that when a potential customer searches for a particular business on Google, the Post shows up front-and-center in the business’ Knowledge Panel

…people have learned to weed out the cheap from the authentic by listening to honest brands (those that are always transparent and trusted by consumers) and ignoring fake ones. Companies with authentic messages flourish, while marketers who attempt to mislead customers or participate in an unrelated conversation pay the consequences.

Early search engines were built on an unspoken transaction — a pact between search engines and website owners — you give us your data, and we’ll send you traffic. While Google changed the game of how search engines rank content, they honored the same pact in the beginning.

The inventors of the web did not realize the graphical and display potential of the web, and as such, HTML was not designed with display considerations in mind. They were so concerned about making web documents machine-friendly that they produced documents that only machines (or particle physicists) would want to read.

When someone searches on Google (or Bing), they are expressing a problem they are seeking to solve, or a question they need the correct answer to. The “raison d’être” of Google and Bing has always been to guide their users quickly and simply to the best available result.

What kinds of content go viral? They certainly are not the conventional blog posts that, while important and effective, offer nothing unusual, exciting, or fun. Content that goes viral has to be wildly humorous or even weird to result in the sharing that makes a piece go viral.

Google is rolling out a new report in Analytics which analyzes a website’s custom audiences. This appears to be a quiet rollout with no official announcement, though Google is notifying users upon logging into Analytics.

Ruth Burr Reedy shares insights with host Hayley Sherman about the importance of effectively onboarding clients to your agency. Ruth discusses some of the most common factors that lead to poor client engagement and how to avoid them.